Machines for dispensing beverages are well known. In more recent times ‘on-demand’ beverage machines have been marketed which allow for beverages to be produced on an individual basis as required by a user from individual sealed capsules, cartridges or flexible bags of ground coffee.
Still more recently, beverage machines allowing for convenient, on demand dispensation of a range of beverage types have been produced. One example of such a system is marketed under the brand name TASSIMO® by Kraft Foods, Inc. This system (as described in EP1440639) utilises a beverage preparation machine that comprises a barcode reader and a range of beverage cartridges wherein each beverage cartridge contains one or more beverage ingredients and is coded with a barcode. In use, the barcode reader of the beverage machine scans and reads the barcode on a beverage cartridge after it is inserted into the machine and uses information decoded from the barcode to set one or more dispensation parameters of the beverage machine for that dispensation cycle. For each beverage cartridge the manufacturer determines the dispensation parameters and applies the relevant barcode at the point of manufacture.
WO2011/141535 describes a support adapted to be associated with a beverage capsule comprising a circumferential sequence of symbols which are readable by an external device as the capsule is driven in rotation. In one embodiment the support can be a separate part that can be coupled to a capsule that has no embedded means for storing information so as to provide a means of adding such information to the capsule. The purpose of the support is to provide means for adding a machine-readable code to a capsule that has no machine-readable code so as to allow the capsule to be dispensed using a beverage preparation machine that requires a code to be read by a code reader in order to function. However, the support of WO2011/141535 is not adapted and configured to provide a means for modifying the delivery parameters of an already encoded beverage capsule or cartridge which is already usable in the beverage preparation machine.